Let's Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They're Responsible For—By Kevin Drum --- Mother JonesSun Dec. 21, 2014 Via Atrios, here is America's-mayor-for-life Rudy Giuliani commenting on the killing of two New York City police officers yesterday by a deranged gunman:“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”....The former mayor also criticized President Barack Obama, Holder, and Al Sharpton for addressing the underlining racial tensions behind the failure to indict the white police officers who killed [Eric Garner on Staten Island] and Mike Brown in Ferguson. “They have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities. For that, they should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.Fair enough. But I assume this means we can blame Bill O'Reilly for his 28 episodes of invective against "Tiller the Baby Killer" that eventually ended in the murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. We can blame conservative talk radio for fueling the anti-government hysteria that led Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. We can blame the relentless xenophobia of Fox News for the bombing of an Islamic Center in Joplin or the massacre of Sikh worshippers by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. We can blame the NRA for the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora. We can blame Republicans for stoking the anti-IRS paranoia that prompted Andrew Joseph Stack to crash a private plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing two people. We can blame the Christian Right for the anti-gay paranoia that led the Westboro Baptist Church to picket the funeral of Matthew Snyder, a US Marine killed in Iraq, with signs that carried their signature "God Hates Fags" slogan. We can blame Sean Hannity for his repeated support of Cliven Bundy's "range war" against the BLM, which eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff and declaring, "If they're going to come bring violence to us, well, if that's the language they want to speak, we'll learn it." And, of course, we can blame Rudy Giuliani and the entire conservative movement for their virtually unanimous indifference to the state-sanctioned police killings of black suspects over minor offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, which apparently motivated the murder of the New York police officers on Saturday.Or wait. Maybe we can't do any of those things. Maybe lots of people support lots of things, and we can't twist that generalized support into blame for maniacs who decide to take up arms for their own demented reasons. Maybe that's a better idea after all.

For a week now, ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been appearing on news programs and going out of his way to make racially insensitive comments regarding the unrest in Ferguson over the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. After getting into a heated argument with professor Michael Eric Dyson last Sunday on Meet The Press that drew a lot of media attention, Giuliani has used Fox News as a safe ground to further denigrate the black community and justify the racist remarks he made towards Dyson. This Sunday, he showed up on Fox News Sunday and continued to blame blacks for any mistreatment they may receive from law enforcement.

In Ferguson, a city of 21,000 people, 16,000 have outstanding arrest warrants due to harassment through petty fines which place a huge financial burden on poor people...Clearly the law is intended to create criminals as fodder for the system...

You Can’t Blame the Policeby Peter Moskos, an associate professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is the author of "Cop in the Hood" and "In Defense of Flogging."MARCH 14, 2012Much — though by no means all — of the disproportionate rate of blacks stopped, frisked, arrested, convicted and imprisoned is a simple reflection of violence in poor African-American communities. Like robbing banks because that’s where the money is, the obvious reason police focus so much of their attention on the young male black community is because that is where the murders are. We need more police and smarter policing.It’s not politically correct to say so, but reality isn't politically correct. Over 90 percent of New York City's 536 murder victims last year were black or Hispanic. Just 48 victims were white or Asian. The rate of white homicide in the city (1.18 per 100,000) is incredibly low, even by international standards. The Hispanic rate of homicide in New York City (5.5) is barely above the overall national average (4.8). And yet the black homicide rate remains stubbornly high (17.2), 15 times higher than the white rate. Blacks are one-quarter of the city’s population and two-thirds of murder victims. Black men age 15 to 29 represent less than 3 percent of the city’s population but account for one-third of those murdered.

Race is not a cause of violent crime, but it does serve as an effective proxy-measure for the social and environmental factors that contribute to violence.In New York City, whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to have a four-year college degree (48 percent versus 20 percent). Unemployment and poverty rates are twice as high among blacks (11 percent versus 5.7 percent and 21 percent versus 11 percent, respectively). Not only is white per-capita income much higher than black income ($45,000 versus $18,000), but black income is disturbingly, almost unlivably low. And what do we do? Blame the police.

Mr. Moskos is mistaken, we do not blame the police for the social conditions associated with crime...we do blame the police for the brutal methods they habitually use... shootings, beatings, lying, intimidation, AND that they defend each other for indefensible actions...we don't need more police, we need more humane police AND as a society, we need justice...

Police do indeed need to work with greater sensitivity and discretion in minority communities. And police should be faulted for ineffective tactics such as misdemeanor marijuana arrests and nondiscretionary stop-and-frisk tactics that cast too wide a net (let us not forget the 99.98 percent of black people who are not murderers). But we also need to applaud and reward police officers, and the N.Y.P.D. in particular, for doing their job and preventing crime and violence.

Ideally, we'd end the war on drugs, the greatest cause of racial disparity in the criminal justice system. But until we do, we need more police and smarter policing, not a knee-jerk politically correct response. Already there are worrisome signs of an increase in violent crime. Last year in New York City, murders of African-Americans increased 31 percent (while white murders declined another 27 percent). Yes, it is important to highlight and correct very real racial disparities in policing and punishment, but not if in doing so we ignore and even contribute to the lethal tragedy of violence among our country's poorest and most undereducated citizens.

Ferguson’s Municipal Court System Makes Millions Off Targeting Black and Poor People

By: Kevin Gosztola Monday August 25, 2014 10:52 amIn the aftermath of the killing of unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the report [PDF] from ArchCity Defenders has been receiving attention for the critical context it provides.“It is not uncommon for young black men to be shot by police officers in the United States of America,” declared Thomas Harvey, one of the organization’s co-founders. “Every time that happens there aren’t riots. So people were searching for explanation,” and, “I think our report gives some context to why there’s an additional level of frustration about the interaction between law enforcement and community.”It highlights how fines issued by the Ferguson municipal court earned the small suburb of St. Louis $2.6 million in revenue in 2013. Ferguson was also one of three municipal courts in the county, which were chronic offenders when it came to violating the fundamental rights of the poor.